Intellectual Adventure: Using MS Access to search 250 Million Records–Part 2

Guest Post by Bob Goethe

This post is a follow up for Intellectual Adventure: Using MS Access to search 250 Million Records

Downloading the Files...from now to January 21, 2016

I have zipped all the files for the 1/4 billion-record database (comprising 1.7 GB zipped, 30 GB unzipped) and made them available for download. You have my permission to do with them as you please, including modifying, and uploading them to other locations and sharing them, without limitation.

Unless you wish to include a text file attesting to how you owe all of your success in life to my example and mentoring-from-afar, you don't need to take any particular action to attribute the files to me.

My personal ISP account has some bandwidth limitations, so rather than letting you download directly from my server, I used YouSendIt/Hightail to share the files. The good news about YouSendIt is, so far as I can tell, there are no bandwidth limitations. Every Access-L member could download a copy and there is no problem.

The bad news is that the files I upload expire a week after I upload them. This means that you can download these files without restriction for the next few days, but the files will become unavailable in the afternoon of January 21.

There are 25 backend MDB files, plus a front end. You can download them all if you choose. You can store them in any folder you wish, but you must make path notations in the table called "DataFiles" so that the frontend knows where to look for its data. The data files can be, in principle, stored in any folder either locally or on a network share. They don't have to be stored in the same location. The frontend knows where to look for each file individually, based on the DataFiles table. The frontend file is called "MS_Jet Test.mdb".

If you would like to play with the database, but don't want to download *all* the files, you can choose to download one file only, called "Files21-25+FrontEnd.zip". This will give you a database of 10,000,000 records only. Again, you will want to go into the DataFiles table in the front end and remove all references to 1.mdb up to 20.mdb if you want to do this.

Files1-4.zip

https://www.hightail.com/download/ZWJYZGVURndvQUp1a3NUQw

Files5-8.zip

https://www.hightail.com/download/ZWJYZGVURnd5UkU4RmNUQw

Files9-12.zip

https://www.hightail.com/download/ZWJYZGVURnc1UjVBSXNUQw

Files13-16.zip

https://www.hightail.com/download/ZWJYZGVURncwMEhOUjhUQw

Files17-20.zip

https://www.hightail.com/download/ZWJYZGVlYStCSWNsYzhUQw

Files21-25+FrontEnd.zip

https://www.hightail.com/download/ZWJYZGVlYStFc0pvSWNUQw

Each zip file contains a collection of further zip files. This odd structure arose as a result of my experimenting with YouSendIt, to find the largest file I could successfully send while using a free account. I mixed-and-matched a bit before I decided that packages of 4 files were a good size to upload. In any case, just keep on unzipping, and eventually you will drill down to MDB files.

If you figure out other interesting things to do with, or to, this database, do share what you learned with this list.

Thanks!

Bob Goethe